The 4 Core Competencies

Reckoning is like any art or sport: succeeding requires being strong in a few fundamental skills.

For example, to play basketball well, you need to know how to dribble, shoot, pass and defend. You can get better at each of these over time through practice. When you can do each well in real time during a game, you become a good player.

The same applies to racial reckoning.

Reckon With has identified 4 core competencies that movement leaders have developed and directed us to practice and implement. Reckon With exposes all participants to these 4 core competencies so we build strength and capacity over time:

History

What? Learn our history truthfully and confront pervasive false myths of racial hierarchy.

How?

• The Daily Acknowledgement Practice

• Each group begins meetings by reading that day’s calendar entry from the Equal Justice Initiative’s History of Racial Injustice calendar

• Each participant researches the history of racial injustice on the street where they live using existing learning resources created by movement leaders and curated by Reckon With

Lineage: Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Audrey Smedley, Nell Irvin Painter, Howard Zinn, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

—James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt” Ebony Magazine, August 1965, “The White Problem in America”

Embodiment

What? Learn to settle our nervous systems, acknowledging the role our bodies play in trauma and repair.

How? Groups engage in somatic practices developed by expert practitioners, such as:

• 5 Anchors, Resource Triangle, VIMBAS, soul scribing and other practices created by Resmaa Menakem

• Incorporating somatic check ins and groundings as participants do acknowledgement and repair practices.

Lineage: Susan Raffo, Resmaa Menakem, Prentis Hemphill, Bessel van der Kolk, Desiree Hammond, Tara Brach.

“The place to begin the all-important healing of trauma is with the body. Your body. Each of our bodies”

- Resmaa Menakem

Calling In

What? Learn to call in and listen deeply so we can have hard conversations productively and lovingly.

How? Role-playing and learning the strategies of how to have challenging conversations well.

Lineage: bell hooks, Loretta J. Ross, Loan Tran, Ruby Sales, adrienne maree brown, Dr. Amanda Kemp, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire.

“I firmly believe that calling in will be as vital to the 21st century human rights movement as non-violence was to the 20th century civil rights movement.”

- Dr. Loretta J. Ross

Root Culture

What? Reconnect with our European root culture resources so we can develop healthy identity and community as we dismantle harm today.

How? Learning our ancestral roots, their songs/languages/foods, developing rituals for celebration and mourning and repair, making toasts communally to make commitments to action and to report on actions taken, learning the values of both/and.

Lineage: Janice Barbee, Sara Axtell, Craig Hassel, Hilary Giovale, the European-American Collaborative Challenging Whiteness.

“We know what we are working against – we know we want to eliminate racism from the world, but what are we working for?” 

- Healing Roots

When implemented simultaneously, these 4 core competencies support grounded and effective reckoning. Neurobiology helps us understand why.

Reckoning is challenging, and it makes sense to use all parts of our brain. But many of us only use our neocortex. Implementing all 4 core practices brings our entire brains online.